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Via Image Map Shader, you can load any texture fairly easily and use it as displacement to make a terrain out of it.

There is an easier way to do it, however! You can also load images with the Heightfield Load operator. When you add a terrain with Add Terrain > Heightfield (load file), the list allows .ter terrains, as well as .bmp and .tga bitmaps.

Be sure to know that the last selection in the list, “*.*”, shouldn’t be overlooked. If you choose this, you can load any file. Of course it makes little sense to load just any data, like an application. Images however, work perfectly. TG2 recognizes all the formats that it accepts for Image Maps. Some of those are .jpg/.jpeg and .png.

If Heightfield Load is used instead of Image Map, some shaders and a lot of tricky Projection and Displacement settings can be avoided!

Inserting objects into a scene isn’t as difficult as it may seem, as long as you have compatible objects. This tutorial refers to the free Xfrog plants offered at Planetside: Download
It works, however, with all other compatible objects as well.

Here we will insert the medium age sweet birch (BL02m_Sweet_Birch.tgo), very typically, on top of a hill.

You’ll find out at the latest when your Mesh looks like an accordion and your Redirect does things it shouldn’t do: either nothing at all, too much, or it results in a render time only Methuselah would appreciate. Hence this tutorial explaining how one can model a canyon with simple means and low render times.